Battle of Halbe

Battle of Halbe
Part of Battle of Berlin
A destroyed Wehrmacht convoy near Spree Forest, April 1945
Date April 24 – May 1, 1945 Location Halbe, Nazi Germany 52°6′24″N 13°42′3″E / 52.10667°N 13.70083°E / 52.10667; 13.70083 Result Soviet victory
Belligerents
Germany	Soviet Union
Commanders and leaders
Theodor Busse Walther Wenck Matthias Kleinheisterkamp †	Georgy Zhukov Ivan Konev
Strength
About 80,000 in the Halbe Pocket 79 tanks 150 armoured vehicles	280,000
Casualties and losses
30,000 killed 25,000 escaped 10,000 civilians killed[1]	20,000 killed or missing[1]
class=notpageimage| Location within Germany

The Battle of Halbe (German: Kesselschlacht von Halbe, Russian: Хальбский котёл, Halbe pocket) was a battle lasting from April 24 – May 1, 1945^[2] in which the German Ninth Army—under the command of General Theodor Busse—was destroyed as a fighting force by the Red Army during the Battle of Berlin.

The Ninth Army, encircled in a large pocket in the Spree Forest region south-east of Berlin, attempted to break out westwards through the village of Halbe and the pine forests south of Berlin to link up with the German Twelfth Army commanded by General Walther Wenck with the intention of heading west and surrendering to the Western Allies. To do this, the Ninth Army had to fight its way through three lines of Soviet troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front under the command of Marshal Ivan Konev, while at the same time units of the 1st Belorussian Front, under the command of Marshal Georgy Zhukov, attacked the German rearguard from the northeast.

After heavy fighting, about 30,000 German soldiers—just over one third of those originally in the pocket—reached the comparative safety of the Twelfth Army's front lines. The rest were either killed or captured by Soviet forces.^{[citation needed]}